The Tiles Between
Shirin Ebadi, the Civil Rights Activist
A small Iranian woman approaches a scanner manned by three looming guards. A beep designates the machine’s rejection of her pass to enter the government facility housing her juvenile client. She steps aside to debate with the guards, explaining her purpose for arrival at the institution. She is here to relieve a young raped girl from the prisons. Unsuccessful in her explanation, she phones one of her counterparts and gains access; nothing will stop her today.
The guards proceed to lead her through the labyrinth of hallways and metal doors. Ebadi has worked tirelessly to rescue the thirteen year old and restore glory to the girl’s family name. This is one of the few families whose little girls are still around to be rescued. Shirin stares down at the monotonous grid etched into the tile… exactly one and half of her steps fits in each white tile… one, two… skip..
“Arian, get back here!” Arian scurries down the stairs so fast she loses her footing. If she can find a dark hiding spot she’ll be safe. The burns on her arms are still healing from her dad’s cigarettes. The meat cellar is not only the coolest space in the house, but it has lots of cold cuts to hide behind and places to crouch. She slides behind a blessed piece of meat until the yelling fades and she’s unsure of the time that’s passed. Just as Arian is nodding off to sleep, a streak of light breaks the darkness through the door. She squints at the shadow that opens it, expecting her brooding father, but instead sees the silhouette of her older brother…. Arian stares methodically down at the square mortar pattern of the chilled tile beneath her… one, two… six tiles she counts between she and her sibling.
The caravan accompanying Shirin Ebadi stops at another blue, metal door. The sign reads “no lay people beyond this point.” Iran has many boundaries: women are not allowed to become judges as they once were, if a family gets divorced the patron of the family has automatic custody, and sex outside of marriage, even if as a rape victim, is punishable by death by stoning. After Ebadi was stripped of her judgeship, she vowed to rescue child victims of abuse neglected by her government’s legal system. The blue door clicks open and one of the guards leans down and whispers with hot breath:
“Death to the traitor Ebadi. You’re only a girl, you mean nothing.”
His whispers are branded into Arian’s memory, more than the bruises. Once you hear something degrading so often, eventually you begin to believe it. Arian questions whether a man will ever take her as his wxife. She fantasizes about the days she and her mother would braid each other’s hair before dressing in hijab. How she missed her mama. Arian simultaneously pets her scalp where patches have populated where her full locks once thrived.
Shirin aches for Arian; she’s fought for months to free her from the prisons. In Iran, if your daughter is raped, one must pay the Iranian government a large sum to not only gain custody of the girl and clear her name, but also to prosecute the perpetrators by execution. This reveals the government’s views that a man’s life, even as a criminal, is more valuable than a woman’s. Shirin spent long nights thinking of strategies with Arian’s mother to raise funds to free her daughter from her ex-family. While Shirin herself was hated by a majority of the Iranian community for representing such victims, she imagined the magnitude of fear Arian had felt. She’d seen the pictures, girls the same ages as her daughters, beaten so badly one could not recognize their faces.
Arian remembers when they came to get her. “Finally, they’re taking me to mama.” And then, just like that, the men took her by the arms to load her like the meat she hid behind just days ago, into their van. And she knew then when her brother and father sat and watched, that the odds were not in her favor. She was hospitalized and put on a ventilator for two days from a broken rib and collapsed lung before being quarantined in a juvenile holding cell.
Ebadi remembers the first time she met Arian. The girl had a shaved head revealing small scars like a pattern, just like those that are etched into Iranian tile. She vowed to free her — and today’s the day, the first time a girl will be freed from the abuse of her own family by her single mother. The last blue metal door stands between Shirin Ebadi, Arian’s lawyer, and the soon-to-be free girl. Ebadi knows Arian will still have a hard life ahead of her, struggling to find a man who overlooks her past and finds her worthy. But Ebadi has devoted her life to the cause, and Arian is only the first. The guards step aside before the door opens, revealing the bright-eyed face of a girl, rescued.
